Preview — The Case of the Pope by Geoffrey Robertson

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For me ... this was a book that I would take up when I should have been doing something else, OR before nodding off at night.

It's a fairly comprehensFor me ... this was a book that I would take up when I should have been doing something else, OR before nodding off at night.

It's a fairly comprehensive discussion of the history of the maelstrom that we call English. Interesting to see how such things tend to be beyond the reach of committees and commissions ... 'English' is a little unhelpful as a label now. The majority of English speakers are L2?

'Globish' seems to me to be a little twee.

But my personal experience of being born into an anglophile NZ community, now long resident in Perth, Western Australia, and a few other places along the way, has shown again and again how we commonly feel that our cultural centre-of-gravity some how knows better. I am surrounded by (a minority - more are immigrants) people with strong local accents who behave, if not challenged, as though they have got English right.

I can feel for our funny French cousins, with their longing to go back and win Waterloo, and my sweet Chinese friends who long for the day when we will all speak Mandarin. Get over it guys.

In the future, the energetic centre of global interaction will surely speak differently (and spell 'centre' differently)from all of us, and it won't be the result of someone's plan.

In the meantime, I occasionally record myself, and squirm, and turn to Al Jazeera and Justice Michael_Kirby as guides to authoritative English, which of course would be seriously distancing while making love.